You do have 007, who's kind of like Batman in that although he has no actual superpowers, he does super heroic things backed by all the technical gadgetry, money and women that he needs.

The infinite set of empty sets?

Presumably, in order to do this, there are sets. — Banno

Sets all the way down.

Suppose you come upon a universe that is empty. You say, "Oranges are absent. Pears are absent. Pomegranates are absent ..." That's a lot of absence, and it takes a mind or an observer to notice it. In a universe containing nothing, there is nothing ... not even absence. This is the same conceptual error the OP is making. Nothing is nothing. There can't be anything. No concepts, not even absence. If you notice there are no oranges, who is doing the noticing? — fishfry

Exactly. There is no such thing as an entirely empty universe with nothing in it.

You agree? If the class has 30 people enrolled and 29 show up, one is absent. Not seven billion. — fishfry

Agreed. Also all the people that don't exist, or are dead, or will be born.

How do you define nothing? — Christoffer

Absence of anything.

If you define that space as having properties, but if there are no properties to that space, isn't it then nothing? — Christoffer

I'm not aware of anything in reality that matches that.

Is it not still a room even if space in between is a vacuum, not even with quantum particles? Does a room need air to be a room? — Christoffer

No. Just pointing out that the space isn't nothing. It's just not building material.

I hold to my own absolute truth: no cunning arrangement of words can oblige things to be thus and not so. — unenlightened

Not even God?

Shall we we say that 'coming from' already presumes space and time? — unenlightened

Pretty much. So is popping into.

You have to add nothing to the building blocks; walls, floors, and ceilings of a house in order for space to create rooms. — Christoffer

That sounds like a really weird way to phrase building a house. But okay, you're creating space for rooms. It's only nothing in the context of it not being building material. There's still air, hopefully.

Guess the question would be does the space between objects exist. — Rank Amateur

Well, the atomists thought the void had to exist for a variety of reasons. But modern physics makes space out to be something and not just a void. It's a good question.

Maybe I am looking at this incorrectly, if you point is “nothing” has no physical presence, I agree- but I don’t think that is any kind of important concept — Rank Amateur

If we're trying to show why something cannot come from nothing, then a good starting place would be to decide whether nothing has any ontological existence. If it doesn't, then there isn't a problem in my book. It's just a play on language.

So where does it all come from? — unenlightened

The absolute vacuum ....

I visualized the universe erupting out of nothing as a quantum fluctuation and I realized that it was possible that it explained the critical density of the universe. — Edward Tryon

I can't tell you how much that language bothers me. Perhaps the actual math/physics makes sense, but what he's saying sounds like nonsense to me.

Meaning to us, but that doesn't mean the absence of something exists as far as nature is concerned.

You don't have to play Chess. — S

But in order to play Chess, you have to follow the rules. Otherwise, you're playing a different game.

not sure the concept of an absence of something occupying some specific space, in some specific time is any less meaningful than the concept of something occupying some specific space at some specific time. — Rank Amateur

Other than things exist occupying specific times and places?

So chunky stuff all the way down?

I go back and forth on the reality of mathematics.

Lucretius made the argument that something can't come from nothing or else anything could pop into existence at any time. We don't observe that, therefore it's impossible. If it were possible, we would observe it, because there's nothing stopping something from popping into existence.

But really it's just a semantic argument because nothing isn't a thing. It denotes lack of existence in language, because it's useful for us to have that concept. It doesn't make any sense to say that something could come from nothing, when nothing is merely a concept.

Here is one place where I agree with the Witty enthusiasts about abusing language to create a seemingly deep philosophical puzzle.

Current theories centered on the big bang are primarily the result of reifying mathematics. — Terrapin Station

That does raise the question of what matter is. Tegmark has a point about physical properties being mathematical.

So was it a quark soup?

But then what about cosmology? Was matter there at the beginning?

As for not understanding, we have math to help with that. Why should we expect to understand something so far removed from everyday experience? It's not like we evolved to be physicists or philosophers.

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It sounds like Aristotle didn't have too much to go on in terms of the natural world and of course, we can't blame him for that since he lived so long ago. I think that back then, the conclusion most would come to is that matter stays the way it is, and only forces of nature could change how matter is. — TogetherTurtle

He did have access to the writings of the atomists, right? I think their reasoning was superior, but lost out for other reasons.

I don't know how that would make sense, though. I can't make sense of there being anything that's not matter or some relation of matter. — Terrapin Station

What about fields and energy? What makes matter more primary?

Space and time aren't "things in themselves," they supervene on matter and its relations. — Terrapin Station

That's one view. But matter might supervene on fields that also make up space and time. Consider the earliest point in the universe right at the Big Bang. Did matter exist then, or did it form because of how things went down with symmetry breaking and inflation or what not?

Is this ontology thing even the right way to think about this, or is there a better way? Perhaps making it more about language or categories? Is this just what is called a language game, or is there something more substantial to it? — S

Is your argument in the OP that ontology is confused because we need to be looking at language games instead to see what is going on when we categorize things?

If so, my response would that ontology remains relevant because there's lots of evidence in favor of reductive explanations and related patterns among various phenomenon. And that's why physics theorizes that four forces are all that's required for everything in the universe, and that ordinary matter is made up of particles that form atoms and molecules.

So there's good reason to think there is a basic stuff the universe consists of. Maybe it's fields, maybe it's particles and spacetime, maybes it's superstrings. Or maybe it's something we can only approximate. If you go back far enough, everything in the universe was part of tiny volume of space that inflated. It's not like rocks, stars and animals eternally populated the cosmos.

Is physics itself a language game? There is certainly agreed upon jargon. But the experiments themselves aren't linguistic. And those have forced scientists to revise their jargon and even replace it over time.

Atoms weren't a thing and then they were, and then they were composed of subatomic particles and light had particle properties, and all the odd QM and GR results. Also that it's heavily mathematical.

Is math a language game?

So if we didn't invent language--and specifically a language like English, then we didn't create it, we're not the originators of it. Who or what is? — Terrapin Station

A Monolith. Haven't you seen the prelude to 2001: A Space Odyssey?

But seriously, csalisbury has a point. Why build a philosophical theory of language without consulting history to see whether there is evidence humans actually acquired language that way?

It means that whatever it is, or whatever the science says it is, that doesn't mean that we have to start talking funny. — S

I voted for realism and rocks in your poll. My thinking would be that everyday objects exist more or less as we experience them (with the addition of scientific facts), but they're not ontologically primary. Something else is, which is approximated by physics.

Whatever it is, let's not throw ordinary language philosophy out with the rubbish. — S

So what does that entail? My problem with ordinary language philosophy is that it seems to stick it's head in the sand regarding the difficult metaphysical and epistemological problems. We know from science that reality can't be simply what we experience. Ancient philosophers knew that as well. Everyday objects of experience aren't enough. There's a reason why naive realism isn't tenable (and by that I mean unreflective naive realism not sophisticated attempts to defend direct realism).

Dunno how reality can be all that far removed from our human experience, — Mww

I should have specified that the ontological makeup that results in the reality of the human experience (everyday objects, time, space and what not) are pretty far removed from everyday experience.

greed; subjective idealism went out with continental German idealism, which advocated a necessary external material reality. — Mww

I don't know that reality is properly material, or even completely physical. It's something with those sorts of properties and relations, but it's not anything like what we get in everyday experience. Maybe its quantum fields with a touch of proto-consciousness or it's mathematical structures all the way down. I don't know. But it's something very far removed from our human experience. Or at least the fundamental (ontological) reality making everything up is.

I guess that means Kant was kind of right. As were the ancient Greek metaphysicians in the sense that reality had to be something counter-intuitive, even if they were mostly wrong about the actual ontology, with some exception for the atomists and Heraclitus.

Interesting. I doubt any professionals disagree with realism, but I certainly hope they don’t agree with realism exclusively. — Mww

I'm sure it's a range, as with all things in philosophy where opinions differ. Personally, I don't think subjective idealism is very tenable. It's hard to think there isn't something real responsible for our experiences, since we experience having bodies that need nutrition, air, water and were born. Also, the whole evolution of life, stars, etc. before us.

Banno has posted survey results of professional philosophers before where a large majority agreed with realism. However, I don't know if that was primarily analytic philosophers, or which group was surveyed.

the dream is there but it's just a dream!!. — Nobody

Can you die in your dream?

Isn't that essentially what humans do? How might the human ones count then if that's all the AI is doing? — noAxioms

My thinking is that we interpret the AI as playing itself in chess because we've set it up to train itself in a way that leads to self-improved chess play. But is that the same thing as actually playing chess?

Since we invented the game to play amongst ourselves, it's safe to say that humans play chess.

Oh, well that's a good question! I guess the answer would be yes, because computing a game is the same result. However, I'm open to questioning whether an AI actually plays chess against itself, as opposed to manipulating matrices or neural network weights.

The constructivist answer would be no, only the games that have been played exist.

The arrow of time is provided by thermodynamics and the initial state of the Big Bang, which is observation-independent, suggesting some kind of mind-independent physical reality. The cat might be alive or dead, but the time since the Big Bang remains the same either way. Also, the fact that there can be cats.

A problem for this interpretation is that the necessary cosmology, astrophysics, geology and evolution would have to be dependent on future observation, even though consciousness depends on having bodies that evolved because of those conditions being met.

which with the other Abrahamic religions is fundamentally intolerant and exclusive, and therefore necessarily antagonistic to any proposition which would appear to cast doubt on its tenets. — Ciceronianus the White

Plus the focus on this life that Stoicism and Epicureanism offer, which is more grounded and reasonable than focusing on sin and the afterlife.

Its just that we have to throw out the 'view from nowhere' , the God's truth', the idea of linear progress, and replace these notions with a more mobile idea of consensus. — Joshs

But we don't have to, if we don't agree with Nietzsche's perspective, particularly on science.

Superstrings, branes, parallel universes, wormholes, singularities, gravitons, pilot waves and any other postulated physical entity that lacks empirical validation.

If diminishes truth in the world – and therefor diminishes trust
If one believes truth and trust are good – things that diminish them are bad

The liar is treating those lied to as a means to an end

Lying makes it harder for those lied to to make an informed decision

Lying corrupts the liar - (a gateway moral wrong to other moral wrongs) — Rank Amateur

Lying in the real world isn't exhausted by the above. We lie to protect other people's feelings, to provide boundaries for ourselves, to protect ourselves and others from the possibility of physical harm, and as a lubricant for social interaction.